Flic, Eve Energy, Siri and living with an 82 year old.

 

I'm living in the UK now, first time for 26 years. There are various reasons why, but one of them is to help my mother who is now 82. Still fiercely independent, but needs help at times. So, we are merging households and we are currently in the process of buying another house for us all to live in. This is, I'm sure, going to cause some interesting scenarios that I had not thought of before, but we are slowly introducing my mum to more recent technology.

My family has been, and continue to be, dotted around the planet. My daughter, and her family, are in Australia, and we were in the Australia and then the USA. So mum can keep up to date with us all, she has become an avid Facebook user and we bought her an iPad, so she can FaceTime. This means she is very used to the Apple iOS/iPadOS UI. So, we've now bought her an iPhone 11.... partly to get a phone with a U1 chip. Before that, she had a flip phone which reminded me very much of 20 years ago and the Motorola StarTac.

We've already turned on FindMy so that if she needs us, when out an about, we can easily find her. I've already used it once when I was convinced that I should have caught up with her by now, and I must have missed her, but she surprised me on how fast she was walking!

Living with my mum has some other interesting consequences. She turns everything off. I mean everything! This is a hang over from my dad drilling it in to mum, and that is basically because of the pre-EU standard wiring system that used to be prevalent in the UK. For the American's here , it was somewhat similar to Knob and Tube. The Europeans changed their standards in the 1970's and so a Neutral wire is very common now. Very unusual to see the old wiring system, may be in some houses that have not been updated in 50 years! 

You may be asking why the plugs are different then. Well the EU standard only covers the wiring, not the plug/socket. The UK has a system where there is a fuse in every plug, and you are supposed to put the correct fuse for the load in the plug, with the idea that the plug fuse blows and doesn't take out the whole circuit. Of course, most people just put in a 15 amp fuse! Good idea, just didn't account for people's inherent laziness.

Some of the devices that mum kept turning off were the two lamps in the living room and her printer. I thought it was a brilliant (Pun not intended) way to introduce mum to Automation. I'd have liked to use Smart sockets, but we are leaving this house, so I have to be able to take anything I implement with us. Therefore I bought 3 Eve Energy Smart Plugs. I've used these before in the USA, and I like them. They now come with Thread support, which improves their speed at switching on when compared to BLE. I have the plugs, for lights, set up in HomeKit to come on 15 minutes before sunset.

I also believe, absolutely, in that it is quicker and easier to use switches than it is to use a voice assistant to switch on lights. This is true because we are creatures of habit, and it is especially true when you have an 82 year old in the house. New things are difficult, not impossible, to learn. SO you pick your battles. Presence detection is even better, but all that equipment is currently on a ship somewhere on the Atlantic. So, I bought some Flic Smart Buttons and a Flic Starter Kit as well as some of their stickers. 

Unfortunately, whilst the Eve Smart Plugs came quickly, the Flic buttons did not. Apparently the manufacturers were surprised about the demand after releasing HomeKit support, tie that in with Covid and some of the world-wide shipping issues it seriously impacted delivery. This just reinforced my thoughts on integrating technology and an 82 year old.

"Siries, please put out the lights"

"SIRIES PUT OUT THE LIGHTS"

There were just two of the versions that my mum used. She was getting increasingly frustrated because she couldn't remember the key phrase and so the volume got louder and louder!

The other thing she kept talking about was that we were getting lazy and the robots are going to take over.

Interesting enough, as she finally got the phrase right two things happened:

1. She stopped talking about the robots taking over and
2. The Flic buttons arrived.

Flic buttons

Setting up the hub was easy. Flic, themselves, have pretty much identified what you have to do:

although I'd say:

1. plug in hub
2. download app
3. configure hub to use WiFi
4. download latest firmware
5. Add button
6. Define it as being used in HomeKit (this is really easy and it does everything for you. No code or anything)
7. Set up actions in HomeKit
1. Single Button Push
2. Double Button Push
3. Long Button Push
8. more buttons: go back to Step 5

Still, I'd say this is the easiest setup I've had for anything in HomeKit.

These screenshots show you the Bridge, one button and how the button is configured when integrated into HomeKit. When not integrated into HomeKit it can affect various other vendors, such as Hue, Nanoleaf, Sonos, Harmony and more.

Once set up in HomeKit as a button:

You can see it as "Light Switch". Inside HomeKit, it looks like:

You can see the 3 options of:

1. Single Press
2. Double Press, and
3. Long Press

I've shown the Single Press turning on the two lights in the living room.

Conclusion

It's early days yet, but I can see me implementing quite a few of these buttons. I actually bought 7 initially. If you think about it, it means you can get 6 functions out of one toggle switch.

Short Press could be, for example, If Lights are off, turn then on. If lights are on then turn them off.

When I set up the button for mum, her response was "I can do it now! Don't need that!" *sigh*